miércoles, 31 de julio de 2013

Detroit: Oh my God!

Comerica Park: this one look great!

Being ardent baseball fans my
wife and I decided to come to Detroit. With the presence of Venezuelan players
like Miguel Cabrera, Anibal Sanchez, Victor Martínez, Omar Infante and others
in the city baseball team, the Tigers, Detroit is to us a Mecca of baseball.
We are now in Detroit and getting ready to see the game between the Tigers and
the Washington Nationals, our other favorite team.

Nothing had prepared us for this
experience. I never suspected a U.S. city could look this. I have seen Castro’s
Havana and I have seen Managua after the earthquake but I thought this kind of
ruin only existed in third world countries led by dictators or without human or
financial resources to remedy it. Hard to believe that it could exist in the
U.S. and so close to Canada! Que verguenza con esos señores..

And yet, the areas near downtown
Detroit that we have seen are the worst I have ever seen in the U.S. They look
like if they went through a long war, with ruins and desolation everywhere.
There are few, if any, people in the streets. Building after building are deserted,
covered with graffiti, with surrounding empty lots and overgrown bushes. How
can a city come down to this? The air of desolation is depressive. I am sure
the outskirts of the city must have better neighborhoods, even areas of middle
and upper classes, but I never suspected that the U.S., as a nation, could tolerate
the look of Detroit without acting decisively about it. I do not know what brought
Detroit to this misery but I am sure it was not a matter of months but of years
of neglect.

State and/or municipal Corruption?
Social Conflict?

We went to see the Motown Museum,
dedicated to the birth of that musical style that took the world by storm
several decades ago, making Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross and many other artists
justly famous. The modest museum is located in two of the small house in West Grand
Avenue where the company started. We went there from our hotel, located in Grand
River Avenue. But only the names of the streets are grand. The route is covered
with misery. The museum is surrounded by funeral homes, in the type of
neighborhood you do not feel safe. Pretty much like Petare, in Caracas. Hold on
to your wallet.

Getting to Detroit is not a piece
of cake, either. From Toledo, a very clean and pleasant city in Ohio we took 75
North to Detroit. It is only 60 miles or so but it feels like 600 miles, along
a route with a poor pavement that makes you feel you are navigating in a stormy
sea. But this is not the worse. The trucks are the worse. Never had we seen so
many of them. Sharing the roads with those monsters took every ounce of my
concentration capacity (not many ounces left). Upon arrival to the hotel, safe
but not sound, I had a couple of stiff whiskies.

Would you believe that the lobby
of the hotel was being remodeled and there was continuous and horrendous
drilling going on? We checked in using
sign language. The room, however, was and is spectacular.

I do not think we will be back to
Detroit, at least for the next 20 years, to celebrate my 100 years. If Detroit still
exists. At least, I hope the Tigers win today.

There are many causes for what has happened in Detroit, but the short explanation is that the city failed to adjust to the economic changes the country has experienced going back to the 1950's.

Detroit was organized around an industrial age economy in which big manufacturing enterprises operated on a large scale, employing hundreds of thousands in the Detroit area alone. Similar manufacturing economies formed the foundations for numerous other cities around the country as well. But what distinguishes the experience of those other cities from Detroit is that the former adjusted to the consumer revolution that took off in the 1950's and the information revolution that was launched in the 1980's while Detroit remained stuck in an industrial-age mindset.

Detroit, and to a certain extent the rest of Michigan, wedded themselves to state and municipal fiscal structures built around an industrial age income tax and property tax structure that drove both businesses and their employees elsewhere. Add into that the fixed decline of the auto industry and your tax base just disappears.

And then on top of all the rest there are the problems of a municipal government that is too close to organized labor, which never cares about preserving the goose laying the golden eggs that sustain it, and a terribly corrupt political culture driven by the worst of political actors and you have a perfect storm that spells disaster.

Sadly; many of these same problems are mirrored in the policies and political culture President Obama has brought to Washington.